Voice Record Pro: A Solid Replacement for Apple’s Voice Memos app

Sometimes, Apple’s Voice Memos app is perfect for quickly grabbing a spoken word note or recording a meeting. On the other hand, it’s quite limited in capability, so users may find themselves wanting more. Voice Record Pro 7 (US$3.99) is a viable replacement to Apple’s native voice memos app, providing more options to record, playback, and upload to cloud storage.

With smartphones came the ability to record such events as meetings, classes, and lectures without the need to carry another device like a digital recorder. The iPhone includes Voice Memos as a native app; it’s beautifully designed and works well, but the options are quite limited. You cannot change the file format from .mp4, nor can the quality of the recording be altered to save on storage. Default export options are limited to Messages, Mail and Notes. It’s no wonder that there are multiple alternative voice recording apps available in the App Store.

When you open Voice Record Pro and tap the record button, a screen for setting up default options appears. You can select low, medium, or high quality, each level of which provides presets for the recording. It’s easy to override these presets and select a custom sample rate, bit rate, bit depth, and encoding quality. Apple’s Voice Memos app only has one setting, and recording a two-hour meeting chews up 55.2MB of storage. At the lowest quality setting, the same recording in Voice Record Pro uses just 12MB of storage and at the highest quality preset it takes up 120MB.

Voice Record Pro has many options for exporting and sharing recordings. There is a built-in web server you can enable in the app, then log into with any web browser on your local network to download a recording. Alternatively, recordings can be uploaded to Google Drive, YouTube (the app converts the file to a video using slides with the title), Dropbox, SoundCloud, OneDrive, Amazon or to an FTP server. You can also attach your recording to an email or text message, or post them on your favorite social media service.

Basic editing is possible, to remove mistakes or combine recordings as well as adding ID3 tags for podcasting. In addition to the default .mp4 format, recordings can easily be converted to the .mp3 or .wav formats.

A big plus for Voice Record Pro is that if you get an incoming phone call, it pauses the recording and then picks back up automatically when you hang up or the ringing stops. Apple’s Voice Memos app just stops the recording and you have to manually restart the recording.

Voice Record Pro is a solid replacement for the default Voice Memos app, and well worth a look if you need more capabilities.